Search for your favorite player or team
© The Hockey News. All rights reserved. Any and all material on this website cannot be used, reproduced, or distributed without prior written permission from Roustan Media Ltd. For more information, please see our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
January 31, 1986
The Hockey News has been providing the most comprehensive coverage of the world of hockey since 1947. In each issue, you'll find news, features and opinions about the NHL and leagues across North America and the world.
How Fans Would Revamp All-Star Format
Memo to the National Hockey League’s movers and shakers: We’ve got some good news and some bad news. First, the good news. Only three per cent of the ballots received in THE HOCKEY NEWS All-Star referendum (Oct. 11th. 1985) chose Option G, which read as follows: Kill it—I don’t think there’s any way of making the All-Star format interesting and. therefore, there shouldn’t even be an All-Star Game of any description. But wait, here’s the bad news. Ninety-one percent (of about 700 ballots received by THN) chose something other than Option A, which read as follows: The Status Quo—The Campbells vs. the Wales is just fine with me. Don’t mess around with a good thing. All of which should not come as a great surprise. Option A and G represented extremes, simple keep-it or kill-it…
Listless Loob A Big Concern For Calgary
CALGARY—Really, there is only one way to look at it. Calgary Flames are testing the trade waters for a game-breaking scorer because they haven’t develop one of their own. Bob Johnson’s pre-season candidates for stardom—Carey Wilson, Dan Quinn and, especially, Hakan Loob—simply haven’t taken that one step ahead. Loob’s listless play is of particular concern because the Flames expected—perhaps unrealistically—a mammoth season from him. Two years ago in the Canada Cup, Loob outplayed countryman Mats Naslund by a substantial margin. Today, Naslund is among the National Hockey League’s premier scorers and Loob isn’t even in the top 100. What happened? No one can quite put their finger on why Loob’s play has been so uninspired. The goals wouldn’t come and as his fragile confidence eroded, so did every other part of his game. That’s why Loob…
Los Angeles Improves Defensively
LOS ANGELES—They set a club record a year ago by scoring 339 goals, the fifth-best total in the National Hockey League. They boasted five 30-goal scorers for the first time in their history. The numbers enhanced the Los Angeles Kings’ long-standing reputation as an offensive power. But goals were difficult to come by the first half of this season. The Kings had scored only 144 in 41 games, 35 fewer than a year ago, a pace that would give them 281 over the 80-game schedule, their lowest output since getting 243 in 1977-78. And yet defenseman Brian Engblom says the club only recently had come to the realization that, because the offensive numbers were down so drastically, it made sense to play with less reckless abandon when in possession of the puck. The change…
Flyers Suffer Momentary Lapses, Losses
PHILADELPHIA—Just when it was starting to look as if the Philadelphia Flyers were going to rocket away from the rest of the Patrick Division, gravity pulled them back toward the pack. In this case the gravity was a former heavyweight named the New York Islanders, and a supposed heavy, the Washington Capitals. The Isles and Caps handed the Flyers back-to-back losses on consecutive nights, and kept the Flyers from turning the Patrick Division into their own drag strip. New York stung the Flyers 4-3 at the Spectrum, where Bryan Trottier scoring a disputed winning goal at the buzzer. The Flyers had taken a 3-1 lead into the third period, and the Islanders’ comeback marked only the second time this season (23-2-0) that the Flyers had lost a game which they led after two periods. The…
Made possible with the support of
